Need Global Talent? Grow Your Own

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With $79 billion in assets, 950 branches, and 42,000 employees, ICICI's demand for workers began to seriously exceed supply in 2003. Today, the company needs to hire some 15,000 to 20,000 new employees each year, a figure that would be even higher if it wasn't for ICICI's strategic approach to the talent contest.

According to K. Ramkumar, ICICI's chief human resources officer, the bank focuses on identifying people with "undeployed, nascent potential" and trains them to become high performers. To get there from here, ICICI has essentially created its own institution of higher education, which uses 2,500 instructors to teach employees online or at nine management institutes around India.

The concept of employee "learnability," meaning you hire somebody with potential (rather than credentials) and provide the necessary education and training, has been adopted by other leading Indian companies as well, including IT and business-process outsourcing giant Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services. When it comes to success, at least in the rapidly developing economies, it turns out that learnability is far more important than credentials. The same might be true in the developed world as well, but many companies in the developed world have lost the training potential to turn learnability into capability.

Optimal Utilization

A second step, in addition to growing people, is to deploy your existing talent the way a military commander might deploy troops. Leading companies in rapidly developing economies typically deploy talent in ways very different from how U.S. and European multinationals do. India's Wipro builds its competitive advantage on the speed in which it trains and integrates new hires into its operation and its practice of moving people between projects so they are as fully utilized as possible.

A third thing managers must do is lead. One of the most important aspects of leadership in the rapidly developing economies is recognizing that everything is constantly changing. This means you need to throw away the old playbook. Whatever was committed to paper just six months ago is probably obsolete by now. Successfully meeting a company's talent needs requires managers who are prepared to jump on opportunities.

Top managers of the up-and-coming companies from the developing world that you're now competing with are often part entrepreneur and part team captain. They are able to do something most Western managers aren't experienced at doing: make it up as they go along.

While leadership means many things, it's clear that success in the global talent contest will require you to:

1. Think globally. Though your office may be in the U.S., consider every country and region where you do business or hope to do business (and even places where you may never do business) when you think about talent.

2. Put together strong local leadership teams to guide your progress. There cannot be a glass ceiling—real or perceived—for local managers. If there is, people will walk.

3. Balance local human resource needs with global standards. This may require tailoring employment packages to local markets to attract and keep top talent, rather than applying global policies for the sake of global consistency.

Competing with everyone from everywhere for everything means you're now competing for people as much as you are for anything else . How well you manage this talent contest could be the difference between success and failure.

Harold L. Sirkin is a Chicago-based senior partner of The Boston Consulting Group and author, with James W. Hemerling and Arindam K. Bhattacharya, of GLOBALITY: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything (Business Plus, June, 2008).